[Chris Going]

It might seem amazing that there isn’t a definitive list of UK targets -or captured target documents, but when one thinks about it further, one gets a bit more sanguine.

One of the things the Western Allies were keen to do in the early Cold war era was keep under wraps what they actually had secured in 1945-6: films, prints, target documents, the lot- so while there was quite a vast amount of cataloguing and evaluation of documents seized (the so called ‘Turban’ programme) this tended to be written up in reports and lists which got destroyed when they were ‘perished’ (in service terms). There’s a report commenced in 1949 which aimed to record the ‘prehistory of Turban’ before memories faded (the author of it noted that there had been a dislike of writing things down and a ‘preference for the telephone’ among Turban personnel), and there is a document by a slightly demob-happy guy in 1960 which is in the UK National Archives, which is a great read. These are rare survivals. Unless documents and lists were declared to be ‘Historic’, a process not everything went through, they were destroyed.

I’m not sure when the Chièvres hoard (got accent wrong last time) turned up -probably soon after the area was freed in late 1944 at a guess, but Dick Tracy was May-June 45, and the IWM stuff probably from 21 AG and a mix of this and that. They were once all catalogued, but precious little of that has come down to us after 77 years.

Best

ChrisG